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1 



F. M. THOMPSON, 
;U>, MASS. 



Address of 

Hon. HENRY CABOT LODGE 

Delivered at Greenfield, June 9, 1903 
On the 1 50th Anniversary of the Incorporation of the Town 



" Seventeen hundred and fifty-five, 
Georgius Secundus was then alive, — 
Snuffy old drone from the German hive. 
That was the year when Lisbon town 
Saw the earth open and gulp her down, 
And Braddoclc's army was done so brown, 
Left without a scalp to its crown. 
It was on the terrible earth-quake day 
That the Deacon finished his one-hoss shay." 

It was a busy time just then at the very middle of the 
Eighteenth Century. And two years before this Annus 
Mirabilis described by Dr. Holmes, two years before the 
Deacon finished his master-piece, or Lisbon was ruined, or a 
British Army was destroyed by French and Indians because 
it would not heed the advice of George Washington, in 1753, 
on the eve of a war which was to convulse Europe, decide the 
fate of India and give North America finally to the English 
speaking people, certain loyal subjects of George II on this 
spot established a new town government. The homes and the 
people had been here from a much earlier time. But now the 
moment had come when the village of the Green River felt 
that it should be independent. The consent of Deerfield had 
been obtained, the State had assented and thereupon Green- 
field became a town and entered on her separate life. It was 
neither an unusual nor an extraordinary occurrence — this birth 

T 



sis 



of a new town achieved in the orderly, quiet way characteristic 
of New England. Among the great events then crowding and 
crushing together to settle the destiny of nations and make up 
the world's history, it passed quite unnoticed except by those 
engaged in the undertaking. Yet we meet here to-day to cele- 
brate the foundation of that town and it is just and right to do 
so for it was a deed wholly worthy of commemoration. I do not 
mean by this the mere act of organizing a town government, 
for that was simple enough. That which is and ought to be 
memorable to us is that men and women at this place had so 
far conquered the wilderness that they were able to form a 
town and that ever since they have been able to carry on their 
town government in peace, order, prosperity and honor. It is 
neither the place nor the time that we would celebrate, but the 
men and their work of which the place and time are but the 
symbol and expression. 

u tos ouSev 6vt£ Trvpyos ovtc. vavs, 
il lpyijxo<; dvSp(ov fir) ^vvolkovvtwv Icrw." 

" Neither citadel nor ship is of any worth without the men 
dwelling in them." 

What we commemorate are these men and their deeds and 
their founding a town was a good piece of honest work which 
represented much. It has abundant meaning if rightly under- 
stood and we may well pause to consider it. The work was 
begun by breaking into the wilderness and in solitude and hard- 
ship subduing the untouched earth to the uses of man. It 
was continued for half a century under the stress of savage 
and desolating war. Then it was crowned with success and 
permanency. 

It is not for me to trace in detail that story of adventure 
and persistent toil, of courage and of hope. That has been 
done already and will be done again still more amply by those 
who live here and who have given to the annals of this region 
the study they deserve. Tempting as all this is, it lies beyond 
the narrow scope of an address. All I can hope for is to bring 



Girt 

H(W 13:907 



before you quite imperfectly, rather disconnectedly, I fear, 
two or three facts which have risen up to me charged with a 
somewhat deep significance as I have reflected upon the his- 
tory of this Connecticut Valley and of this town of Greenfield. 
It is not the hundred and fifty years which has struck me as 
at all important. Periods of time are all comparative. A 
century and a half constitutes a remarkable age in America. 
It is youth in England and in Western Europe. But the 
oldest town of England is modern compared to Rome ; Rome 
is of yesterday when put by the side of Egypt, and the Roman 
law which runs far beyond our Christian era is a new inven- 
tion when placed beside the six thousand year old code of the 
Babylonian King Humarabbi. On the other hand, time can- 
not be computed for us by the calendar alone. The Aruwhimi 
dwarfs of the African forests were noted by Herodotus and 
then again by Stanley after a little interval of some three 
thousand years. If it had been three hundred or thirty thou- 
sand it would have been just as important, for nothing had 
happened. As they were when Herodotus mentioned them 
so they still were when Stanley stumbled upon them in the 
tropical forest. 

u Better fifty years of Europe 
Than a cycle of Cathay." 

It is the rate at which men live which must be counted as 
well as the calendar when we reckon time. The years of the 
French Revolution covered a wider space in life and experience 
and meaning than the entire century which preceded them. 
The American people lived more and lived longer between 
1 86 1 and 1865 than in all the years which had passed since 
Yorktown. So our century and a half of town existence looks 
very short when we put it side by side with the long proces- 
sion of the recorded years fading away into a remote distance 
in the valleys of the Tiber and the Nile. Yet for all that it 
is not brief. Properly regarded it is a very long time for it is 
with nations even as with men : 



" One crowded hour of glorious life 
Is worth an age without a name." 

The last one hundred and fifty years have witnessed politi- 
cal and economic changes more rapid and more profound than 
five previous centuries could show. The same period has seen 
a revolution in the affairs of the world and in the relations of 
men, due to the annihilation of time and the reduction of space 
by electricity and steam, which separates us further in certain 
ways of life from the men who fought at Waterloo than from 
those who died at Thermopylae and in all the history of this 
wonderful time there is no chapter more wonderful than that 
which we ourselves have written. 

Let us look at it once more as it comes out here in the his- 
tory of this town. Where we stand was once a frontier, not a 
mere boundary line between one state or one country and an- 
other, but a true frontier, the far-flung line of advance against 
the savage and the wilderness. 1 have often thought that a 
book which told the story of the American frontier would be 
of intense interest. As one thinks of it in what seems to me 
the true fashion, one comes to personify it, to feel as if it were 
a sentient being, struggling forward through darkness and 
light, through peace and war, planting itself in a new spot, 
clinging there desperately until its hold is firm and then plung- 
ing forward again into the dim unknown to live over the old 
conflict. Frontiers such as ours have been do not go slowly 
forward building one house next another in the manner of a 
growing city. The Puritan Englishmen of Massachusetts 
Bay had scarcely fastened their grip upon the rugged shore 
where they had landed before Pyncheon had pushed out from 
the coast and established his outpost on the Connecticut. 
From Springfield the little settlements spread slowly up and 
down the river and thus the new frontier was formed. The 
older plantations along the coast were then no longer outposts 
and the space between them and the western line lay ready to 
be filled in. Gradually the villages planted themselves and 



crept northward up the river subduing the wilderness and reap- 
ing the harvest of the rich valley. They were just beginning 
here when the red man came to the aid of" the yielding forest 
and the savage war known by the name of Philip broke upon 
them and went raging and burning, hither and thither along the 
river, thrusting itself down between the towns to the eastward 
and into the very heart of the coast settlements. Many were 
the fights close by here, most conspicuous the bloody defeat 
at the Brook and the shining victory at the Falls, which still 
bear the victor's name. For weary months and years the war 
blazed red and wild, then it began to flicker, flaring up only 
to sink down again into smoldering embers until it finally died 
away leaving ashes and desolation as its monuments. 

Again the pioneers worked their way up the river, again 
the houses rose and the meadows smiled and the forest was 
cleared. This time the settlers took a firmer grip. Grants 
of land were made here, mills built and Deerfield sent her 
representative to Boston to sustain the cause of William 
against James. But William of Orange had more serious 
enemies than his poor, confused father-in-law. Louis XIV 
made war upon him and again the storm of savage invasion 
broke on the New England frontier, guided now by the in- 
telligence of France. Much fighting and burning ensued, but 
the settlers held on or came back after the Peace of Ryswick 
in 1697. Then a brief lull, then a disputed Spanish throne, 
once more France and England fought and again the French 
and Indians poured down upon the valleys and hillsides of 
New England. Here the worst blow fell. Deerfield was al- 
most swept from the map already so deeply scarred. It was 
such a long war too. It went on for some ten years after the 
sack of Deerfield. Men's hearts began to fail. They were 
ready almost to think that this was an accursed spot, dogged 
by misfortune and haunted by slaughter and pillage. But the 
stout hearts did not fail entirely. The men made their way 
back again after all. They held on to this beautiful valley 



and over the ruined homesteads they finally planted them- 
selves more conclusively than ever. War was not over by 
any means. There was peace in Europe, but the Jesuit mis- 
sionaries had not made peace and Father Rasle's War, as it 
was called, led to sharp and bloody fighting in New England, 
chieflv to the eastward, but with enough of ambush and mur- 
der and sudden death in these valleys to make the people 
realize the hard tenure by which they held their lands. When 
the war of the Austrian succession came, Deerfield was still 
on the edge, but the fighting frontier had moved forward and 
the little hill towns, each with its fort, formed a line of out- 
works. Before the " old French war" as we have been wont 
to call it, broke out ten years later, Greenfield had been born 
and the line of frontier swung to the north and ceased to be a 
frontier when Canada passed into English hands. Now, too, 
it stretched away westward until it joined that other advance 
guard of settlements which had crept up the Hudson and 
then turned to the west along the Mohawk. The frontier 
days of the Connecticut valley were over and it had taken 
half a century to do it. Children had been born and had 
grown to be elderly men and women who had known nothing 
but more or less constant war. They had passed their lives 
in fighting to hold their own here among their peaceful hills 
facing the wilderness, listening nightly for the war whoop and 
watching dailv for signs of a lurking foe. What a splendid 
story it is and have we not the right to be proud of the men 
who made it possible ? 

But the unresting frontier sprang forward, much lengthened 
now and running north and south along the Alleghanies when 
the Revolution began. Then George Rogers Clarke carried 
the country's boundary to the Mississippi and after peace came, 
the frontier moved slowly and painfully alter it across the 
" Dark and Bloody Ground," along the Great Lakes at the 
north and the Gulf at the south. Then there was a pause 
while all that vast region was taken into possession and then 



7 

the frontier leaped onwards again in the southwest and pushed 
the boundary before it far down to the Rio Grande. Another 
pause while the settlements slowly shot out beyond the Mis- 
sissippi and then came the war with Mexico, the Pacific coast 
was ours and a second frontier began to move eastward toward 
that which had been travelling westward tor more than two 
hundred years. In our time we have seen them meet. It is 
only a few years ago and the meeting was hardly noticed. 
Men scarcely realized that there had ceased to be a frontier in 
the United States, that there was no longer a line where the 
hardy pioneers stood face to face with an untamed wilderness, 
ever pressing forward against it. Indian wars had ended, the 
red man was finally submerged by the all-embracing tide of 
the white civilization. Those wars had lasted for more than 
two hundred and fifty years, they sank into a final peace and 
silence and the hurrying American world did not stop to note 
it. But history will note it well and ponder upon it, for it 
marked the ending of a long struggle and the beginning of a 
new epoch. The American frontier had ceased to be, the con- 
quest of the continent was complete, the work which the men 
of Greenfield and Deerfield had carried on for fifty hard fight- 
ing years was finished at last far out upon the western plains. 
If you would know what that fact meant ask yourself how it 
is that American enterprise in the last six years, leaping over 
our own borders, has forced its way into every market of 
the globe and why the flag floats now from Porto Rico to 
Manila ? 

This making and moving of a frontier has been a mighty 
work and that part of it which was done here during fifty years 
of conflict, remote, unheard of in the great world of the eight- 
eenth century, seems to me both fine and heroic. There was 
no dazzling glory to be won, no vast wealth to be suddenly 
gained from mines or wrested from the hands of feeble natives. 
The only tangible reward was at the utmost a modest farm. 
But there was a grim determination not to yield, a quite set- 



tied intention to conquer fate, visible still to us among those 
men, silent for the most part, but well worth serious contem- 
plation in these days when success is chiefly reckoned in 
money value. 

Consider, too, how this work of these old pioneers wrought 
out here in this distant corner as it then was of the British 
Empire, formed, as all labor worth the doing must form, part 
of the work of the race and of the world. See how it touched 
and responded to the events of the world as the pulse beats 
with the heart and how these men, consciously or uncon- 
sciously, it matters not, lived the life of their time which to all 
men who are real must be the supreme test. Just before Par- 
sons built his mill here England was deciding whether James 
Stuart or William of Orange should rule over her; whether 
she would continue free or sink back to an autocratic mon- 
archy, and Deerfield, not knowing how the issue might turn, 
sent her man across the forests to Boston and cast in her lot 
with the Dutch Prince. Louis XIV and William of Orange 
grappled on the plains of Flanders and at once the war whoop 
of the savage and the crack of the English musket broke the 
stillness of these valleys. Such free, representative govern- 
ment as then existed rested solely in the keeping of the Eng- 
lish speaking people. France represented despotism and the 
power of France was its bulwark. The struggle broke out 
again under Anne, nominally over the Spanish succession, 
really to determine whether France should dominate Europe 
and America. For this cause of English freedom Malbor- 
ough won Blenheim, Deerfield went up in flames and Massa- 
chusetts farmers fell dead by their plows or hunted their French 
and Indian foes through the forests of New England. 

The struggle between France and England did not end, 
however, with the Peace of Utrecht. France was checked 
and beaten but not crushed and the century was little more 
than forty years old when the long standing conflict was re- 
newed. Again the frontiersmen tought and this time New 



England took Louisburg, the one serious triumph of an ill- 
conducted war. And during all this time, in peace and war 
alike, the people of New York and New England slowly 
pushing forward, slowly gathering strength, were determining 
who should be the masters of America. The final decision 
could not be long postponed and it came to the last arbitra- 
ment in 1 756. It was a great war, that " war of seven years " 
as it was called. It settled many questions of mighty import ; 
that Frederick the Great of Prussia should not be crushed but 
should rise in victory over Bourbon and Hapsburg and 
Romanoff; that India should become a possession of Great 
Britain and India's millions her subjects, as well as sundry 
other matters of less meaning to us to-day. But it also deter- 
mined finally that North America should belong to the English- 
speaking people and not to France, something more momen- 
tous to the world's future, politically and economically, than 
any other event of that time. 

Pitt said that he " conquered America on the plains of Ger- 
many." It is true enough that the death struggle then in 
progress between the English and North German people on 
the one side and the Bourbon and Hapsburg monarchies on 
the other had to be sustained in every quarter of the globe. 
But the effort to gain sole dominion in North America for 
the English-speaking people would have been utterly vain if 
it had not been for the labors of that same people in America 
itself. The English colonies in America founded and built 
up slowly and painfully by men whose existence England at 
times almost forgot, were the efficient cause of the overthrow 
of France in the New World. 

" The Lilies withered where the Lion trod ; " 
but the Lion would never have reached the Lilies if his path 
had not been cleared for him by the stubborn fighters of the 
American colonies clinging grimly to the soil they had won 
and ever pressing forward the restless frontier behind which 
towns gathered to mark the progress ot the march. 



IO 

So the half centuty of conflict ended. Another George was 
on the throne, the northern danger had passed away and men 
began to consider their relations with the mother country. 
We know well what followed. Ignorance and arrogance in 
London bred resistance in America until at last revolution was 
afoot and the American people determined to make a new 
nation in the new world. The movement now was toward 
independence and democratic government. In the latter di- 
rection all the western world was soon to take part, but the 
first step was ours. As in the earlier days when the question 
was whether English freedom should prevail over Bourbon 
monarchies, so now Greenfield lived the life of the time. She 
sent her men to Boston to join Washington's army. She re- 
sponded vigorously to the call that came later over the moun- 
tains to go forth and help to compass the destruction of 
Burgoyne. And from the days of revolution onwards, so it 
has always been. You have always lived the life of your time. 
You have stood the supreme test. You helped to make the 
State. You sustained the Constitution upon which the nation 
was founded. From these valleys in generation after genera- 
tion men and women have gone forth to carry forward the 
frontier and subdue the continent even as your ancestors did 
over two hundred years ago. When the hour of stress and 
peril came you have not failed. When the life of the nation 
was at stake your sons went forth and fought for four years 
to save the Union. In the war of five years ago soldiers from 
this town were at the front in Cuba and the last sacrifice of 
young life was offered up at El Caney for flag and country. 
You have a right to be proud of your record, for you have 
done your share to the full and no one can do more. You 
have never sunk back in ignoble ease and held aloof from 
your fellows. In the advance columns of the nation you have 
always marched. The stern cry of " Forward " has never 
fallen here upon deaf ears or been disobeyed by faint hearts. 

Yet there are some persons, native alas, and to the manner 



II 

born, who can see nothing of interest, nothing picturesque, 
nothing romantic in this history of the United States, one 
little fragment of which I have tried faintly to outline. Such 
beings, steadily declining in numbers in these later years, al- 
ways remind me of the tendrils which a vine sometimes thrusts 
through the crevices of a house wall into some cellar or un- 
used chamber. They grow there in the twilight very fast, 
quite perfect too in form for they are in shelter there where 
the winds do not beat upon them nor the sun scorch nor in- 
sects gnaw them. But they are pale things, white of leaf and 
shoot, when they should be dark and green. And then winter 
comes and the vine sleeps and when it awakes in the spring 
the hard brown trunk and branches which have been twisted 
and whipped in the storms and faced cold and heat and sun- 
shine and cloud, fill with sap and burgeon with leaves and 
rich young life, but the tendrils which have crept into the 
sheltered dimness of the cellar are withered and dead and 
bloom no more. 

So the pallid souls who can see nothing, read no meaning 
in all this history of the United States have dwelt so long in 
the twilight of the past, in the shelter of foreign lands far from 
the rude, vigorous, exuberant life of this new world of ours 
that they have grown feeble of sight and extinct of feeling. 
They must have ruins and castles and walled towns and all 
the heaped up riches of the centuries about them before they 
can believe that there is any history worth the telling. He 
would indeed be dull of soul who could walk unmoved of 
spirit among the tombs of Westminster or gaze indifferently 
upon the cathederal of Amiens or look out unstirred over the 
Roman Forum or behold from the Sicilian shore without a 
quickening of the pulse, the crags which Polyphemus hurled 
after Ulysses. Man's work on earth is of profoundest in- 
terest to man and where his monuments are gathered thick- 
est memories cluster most and we seem nearest to those who 
have 2one before. But those who think that this is all mis- 



12 

take the vesture for reality. They are still believers in the 
doctrine of clothes explained once by Thomas Carlyle in a 
manner which it would profit them to read. Like Lear they 
would do well to tear off" these lendings," come to the naked 
facts and find the soul which inhabits them. 

There is something older than walled towns and castles 
and ruins and that is the history of the race who built them. 
It is well to give the plays of Shakespeare all the splendors of 
mounting and costume and scenery which the resources of 
the modern theatre can bestow, but these things are not 
Shakespeare. The immortal poetry, the greatest genius 
among men were all there on the bare platform of the "Globe" 
playhouse when a sign alone told the audience what the scene 
of action was. The background is important, very pleasur- 
able too, but the drama of humanity is what gives it value 
and the scenery is secondary to the actors and the play. The 
trappings and the clothes of history count for much no doubt 
in Europe or Asia or Egypt chiefly for what they tell us of 
those who made them, but man himself and ot our own race 
is and has been here too for some three hundred years just 
as in those older lands. Come out of the twilight then into 
the noonday and look at him and his deeds. Here we have 
seen in our history men engaged in that which was the very 
first battle of humanity against the primeval forces of nature 
before there was any history except what can be read in a few 
chipped flints. Here in this America of ours in the last three 
centuries we have had waged the bitter struggle of the race 
against the earth gods and the demons of air and forest, but 
it has been carried on by civilized men, not skin-clad savages, 
upon a scale never known before and which, in our little globe 
now all mapped and navigated, will never be seen again. Our 
three centuries have watched the living tide roll on, pushing 
the savage who had wasted his inheritance before it, and 
sweeping off to one side or the other rival races which strove 
with it for mastery. Here has been effected the conquest of 



*3 

a continent, its submission to the uses of man and there is no 
greater achievement possible than this with all its manifold 
meanings. Here the years have seen a new nation founded, 
built up and then welded together in the greatest war of the 
last century at a vast sacrifice dictated only by faith in country 
and by the grand refusal to dissolve into jarring atoms. To 
me I declare there is here an epic of human life and a drama 
of human action larger in its proportions than any which have 
gone before. To those who can discern only crude civiliza- 
tion, unkempt, unfinished cities, little towns on the border, 
unbeautiful in hasty and perishable houses, rawness and rough- 
ness and a lack of the refinements of more ancient seats of 
the race, I say, you are still under the dominion of the relig- 
ion of clothes. You hear only the noise of the streets and 
you are deaf to the mighty harmonies which sound across the 
ages. 

There is a majestic sweep to the events which have befallen 
in this Western Hemisphere since the founding of Jamestown 
and Plymouth which it is hard to rival in any movement of 
mankind. And it is all compact of those personal incidents 
which stir the heart and touch the imagination more than the 
march of the race because we are each one of us nearer to the 
man than to the multitude. These are the events which in 
the mass make up human history and wherever human history 
has been made we find them, whether on the windy plains or 
Troy or in an American forest. No need to go beyond this 
valley to show my meaning. The little group in Queen 
Anne's War holding the Stebbins house in smoke and flame 
against overwhelming odds, the women and children in Mr. 
Williams's home murdered shrieking in the darkness are as 
tragic in their way as Ugolino in the Tower of Famine but 
they have had no Dante to tell their tale. The farmer slain 
at his plow, the stealthy scouting through the dusky woods, 
the captives dragged over ice and snow to Canada are as full 
of deep human interest as the English adventurer or the Ital- 



i4 

ian Condottiere or the German Lanzknecht who sold their 
swords to the highest bidder in Italy four hundred years ago. 
They deserve interest far more too and were doing work in 
world conquest which counted in the final reckoning and was 
not merely a noisy brawl, dying into eternal silence when the 
tavern closed. Travel two thousand miles from here to the far 
Southwest and look at the last fight of David Crockett. Is 
there anything finer in the history of brave men than that 
death grip at the Alamo ? The great scout wore a buckskin 
shirt ; it was all less than seventy years ago, but strip the 
clothes and man for man how does he differ from Leonidas ? 
Remember too, as has been said, that Thermopylae had her 
messengers of death and the Alamo had none. The spot 
where human valor has reached to the highest point attainable 
is as sacred in Texas as in Greece. It is full and brimming 
over that history of ours with the labors and toils, the sor- 
rows and victories of human beings like ourselves ; with 
comedy and tragedy, with pathos and humor and poetry. 
All that is needed is the seeing eye instead of a vision grown 
dim in a region of half-lights. Byron looked at it and the 
drama of the frontier and the men it bred rose clear before 
him. In noble verse he has embodied that march of the 
race against untamed Nature in the figure of Daniel Boone 
fighting the savages, fighting the forest, hunting the wild ani- 
mals in their lair until the reserves of the army had crossed 
the Alleghanies and come up to his support. And then the 
old man feels choked and smothered by the civilization and 
the settlements for which he has cleared the way and fought 
the battles and he passes on, a grim grey figure, and crosses 
the great river and goes again into the wilderness where he 
can be alone under the sky and watch the stars and hear the 
wind upon the heath untroubled by the sound of human 
voices. 

It is a far cry from the English peer to the American car- 
penter but both could see the realities below the surface and 



"5 

Whitman, poet and prophet, felt in his soul the poetry of the 
great democracy. He saw it in the crowds of New York, in 
the common affairs of life, in the great movement over the 
continent, in the pioneers who led the advance and in strange 
forms he gave it to the world first to wonder at and then 
dimly to understand. Emerson, a greater man than either of 
these, read the meaning of this great new world and gave it 
forth in a message which dwells forever in the hearts of all 
who have paused to listen to his teachings. Hawthorne and 
Holmes, Whittier and Lowell and Longfellow all in their de- 
gree heard the voices of the land and of its people and touched 
their highest notes when inspired by them. 

They are all there, the epic and the drama and the lyric. 
They are all there in the great movement with its wide sweep 
passing on relentless like the forces of nature. You will find 
every one of them if you come nearer, in the small commu- 
nity, in the family, in the individual man instinct with all the 
passions, all the aspirations, all the fears of the human heart, 
new with the freshness of eternal youth and ancient as the 
first coming of man upon earth. And if the scenery and the 
trappings, the clothes, the titles, and the contrasts of condition 
are lacking, there is this compensation that this story is all 
alive. It leads us to the very portals of the present and the 
imagination looking thence can dispense with an outworn past 
when it can range over the future which belongs in ever in- 
creasing measure to the new world. 

To this hour, then, we have come. We have travelled far 
in thought and we have been gazing backward over the road 
by which we have passed. Let us turn our eyes for a mo- 
ment upon the present which is our own, which lies all about 
us and peer thence into the future which stretches before us 
limitless and unknown. We have toiled hard in our three 
hundred years. What have the generations accomplished ? 
Very great results no one can doubt. By such work as has 
been done here in this valley we have made a great nation, no 



i6 

greater now extant as it seems to me, and yet we are only be- 
ginning to run our course. We are still young and un- 
breathed, with mighty strength and muscles trained and 
unexhausted. We have amassed riches beyond the dreams 
of avarice and our resources are neither wasted nor decayed. 
We have shared in the revolution of steam and electricity and 
harnessed them to our purposes as no other people have 
done. We have also in these and other ways quickened life 
and living to an enormous degree. Our vast industrial and 
economic machinery is pushing forward with an accelerating 
speed at a rate which should inspire us with caution as it al- 
ready inspires other nations with alarm. All the instrumen- 
talities of learning, of art, of pleasure are growing with an un- 
exampled rapidity. We have contributed to literature, we 
have done great work in science, we have excelled in inven- 
tion, we have bettered vastly the condition ot lite to all men. 
There is to-day no more portentous fact in this world of ours 
than the United States. A great country, a great people; 
courage, energy, ability, force, all abundant, inexhaustible ; 
power, riches, success; glory to spare both in war and 
peace; patriotism at home ; respect abroad. Such is the pres- 
ent. Such are the results of the century and a half we com- 
memorate here to-day. 

But this is not all. We should be undeserving ot our past, 
reckless of our future if we did not fully realize that we are 
human, that we have our perils and our trials, and that success 
can be kept only as it has been earned by courage, wisdom 
and a truthful mind, which looks facts in the face and scorns 
all shams and delusions. We have met and solved great 
problems. We have other problems ever rising with the re- 
current years, which like those that have gone before will not 
settle themselves but must in their turn be met and brought 
to a solution. Our problems are our own. They grow out 
of the conditions of the time as those of our fathers did in the 
earlier days. From without there is nothing we need fear. 



»7 

" Come the three corners of the world in arms and we shall 
shock them." Nor does cause for serious anxiety arise from 
the ordinary questions of domestic management. Tariffs and 
currencies, the development of the country, the opening of 
waterways, the organization of defense and of administration 
can all be dealt with successfully. The government of our 
great cities, the problem of the negro, the question of regulat- 
ing and assimilating our enormous immigration are in the high- 
est degree grave issues of great pith and moment which have 
a large bearing upon our future weal or woe. But I think 
they can all be met, that they all will be met with patient ef- 
fort and with a due measure of success. None of them touches 
the foundations of society or the sources of national life unless 
they should be neglected or mishandled to a degree inconceiv- 
able with a people so intelligent and so energetic as our own. 
But there are certain questions looming up, the outgrowth 
of conditions common to the whole world of western civiliza- 
tion and arising from the vast expansion and phenomenal ac- 
celeration of the industrial and economic forces of the age. 
They touch us particularly because we are expanding and 
quickening our economic movement more largely and more 
rapidly than any other people. We have, in other words, a 
higher energy of organization and production than any other 
nation. For this reason we are driving less highly organized 
and less energetic peoples to the wall. Whether the opposition 
thus aroused can be stilled or whether it will become desperate 
and manifest itself in a political or military manner no one can 
say. It behooves us, however, to watch carefully and be al- 
ways on our guard both in our conduct and in our readiness. 
Yet there are other conditions which modern forces produce 
even graver than this. The dangers threaten from sources 
widely different, even absolutely opposed and yet reacting 
upon each other. The new conditions, while they have raised 
greatly the well-being of the community and of the average 
man, have also caused an accumulation of fortunes and a con- 
1 



i8 

centration of capital the like of which has never been seen be- 
fore. Here lies one peril — that of irresponsible wealth. 
Wealth which recognizes its duties and obligations is in its 
wise and generous uses a source of great good to the com- 
munity. But wealth, which, if inactive, neglects the duty it 
owes to the community, is deaf to the cry of suffering, seeks not 
to remedy ignorance and turns its back upon charity or which, 
if actively employed, aims to disregard the law, to prevent its 
enforcement or by purchase to control legislation, is irre- 
sponsible and therefore dangerous to itself and to others. The 
tyranny of mere money in society, in politics, in business or 
in any of the manifold forms of human activity is the coarsest 
and most vulgar tyranny, as worship of mere money is the 
most degraded worship that mankind has ever known. Over 
against this danger lies the peril of the demagogue, of the men 
who would seek to create classes and then set one class against 
another, the deadliest enemies to our liberty and our de- 
mocracy that the wit of man could imagine. Under the guise 
of helping to better the common lot they preach a gospel of 
envy and hatred. They ask men to embark on changes which 
may possibly relieve them from the pain of seeing anyone 
more fortunate and successful than themselves but which will 
not improve but will probably lower and injure their own con- 
dition. They proclaim panaceas, social and political, which 
are as old as man's oldest attempts at government and which 
have an ancient record of dismal failure. They ask us to 
come to a beautiful country of hills and woods and meadows, 
rich and fertile, with river and brook sparkling in the sun- 
light. They point to the promised land lying far away and 
dimly discerned upon the horizon. If you follow them the 
vision fades. It was but a mirage and you find yourself in- 
deed upon a level plain but the plain is a desert, arid and 
desolate, where hope and ambition lie dead and the bones of 
those who have gone before bleach upon the sands. 

I am no pessimist. I am an optimist and 1 have a bound- 



19 

less faith in my country and her people. But he would be a 
poor sailor who did not watch out for the reef on one side 
and the shoal upon the other because his ship was leaping 
forward with every sail straining before the favoring breeze. 
So it is our duty that we all, each in his due proportion, seek 
to carry this great nation forward upon the voyage of life. We 
have weathered many storms and we fear them not. But let 
us not forget that however conditions change, the great under- 
lying qualities which make and save men and nations do not 
alter. 

I look back upon the event which we commemorate to- 
day. In the great book of the world's historv it is but a 
line. Yet I find there the principles which alone 1 believe 
will enable us to strive and conquer as in the olden times. 
First I see a great solidarity of interest. Those men were 
foes to anarchy, most hateful of all things in human history. 
They fought shoulder to shoulder, united in purpose and de- 
termined that where they dwelt order should reign and not 
chaos. They met here one hundred and fifty years ago and did 
three very memorable things. They organized a town ; they 
established a church ; they opened a school. The simple, 
everyday, instinctive acts of an American community, you 
say. Yes truly, but it is because these have been hitherto the 
simple everyday acts of the American people that America 
is what she is to-day. These men of Greenfield a century and 
a half ago recognized three great tacts, religion, education, 
ordered government. They recognized that they stood here 
upon the " bank and shoal of time " for one brief moment 
between two eternities. They declared in their simple fash- 
ion that the man or nation who did not recognize that there 
was something spiritual in them higher than all earthly and 
material things would surely pass down into ruin and darkness 
and that here pretenses were worse than nothing and could 
never serve. They recognized ignorance as an enemy and us- 
ing to the utmost such modest means as they had they pro- 



20 

posed that so far as in them lay it should not be endured among 
them. Lastly they recognized the vital need of order and gov- 
ernment and they set up the town meeting, the purest democ- 
racy this modern world has seen or can yet see in actual opera- 
tion among men. In that town government they embodied as 
the great central principle, the largest individual liberty compat- 
ible with the rights of all. They built their town on the doc- 
trine that all men must work and bear each one his share of the 
common burden, that the fullest scope must then be given to 
each man and that each man thus endowed with opportunity 
must make his own fight and win his own way and that no 
one else could or ought to do it for him. It was the stern 
doctrine of a strong race, but on that doctrine the United 
States have risen to be what they are to-day. The rights and 
the good order of the community are in the charge of the 
government and the government must guard and protect them. 
But beyond that each man's fortune rests in his own hands 
and he must make it good. It will be a sorry day for this 
republic when the vital principle of the town meeting which 
has been thus far the vital principle of the American people 
is disregarded or set aside. 

As we look back into the past it is well to bear these lessons 
in mind, for otherwise we are false to its teachings. In the 
problems and difficulties which gather around us, in the future 
which stretches before us — a great and splendid future as I 
believe — we cannot go far wrong if we cling to the faith of the 
men who founded this town a century and a half ago. They 
built it on religion, on free government and on the largest 
liberty possible to the individual man. They sought no readv- 
made schemes to solve in a moment all difficulties and cure 
all evils. Slowly and painfully they had fastened themselves 
and their homes in this valley and they knew that only slowly, 
by much hard work and never by idleness and short cuts could 
they make the condition of the community and of all its 
members steadily and permanently better. They sought 



2 1 

always to level up, never to level down. They looked facts 
in the face and did the duty nearest to their hands with all 
their strength. They were diligent in business and prospered 
as they deserved. But they did not forget that intelligence 
and character were of more value than wealth in the long 
process of the years. They felt, dimly perhaps, but none the 
less earnestly, that what they were, not what they had would 
count most when the final reckoning came. On the founda- 
tions they laid, the great structure of the United States has 
been reared. In the splendor of accomplishment let us not 
forget the beliefs and the principles of those who placed the 
corner stone. 



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